Art of disappearing 7, August 2009

The Final Instalment

of Gabriel Rosenstock’s

The Gentle Art of Disappearing: Part 7 & End

We have been publishing the above in instalments and now we have reached the final part. This issue completes this unusual but incisive analysis of the art of haiku from the author’s unique study and view. The World Haiku Club finds it a special pleasure to announce that this excellent series is now in a book form as it is being published to reach much wider circles of readers. We do not hesitate to predict that this book could be one of the classical and definitive studies of haiku literature. It is also a fine study of us humanity, the world in which we live and the nature and the universe through haiku. We would recommend this book to you all.

For details of the book and how to obtain a copy (especially the 50% discount offered) see the notice under the title of The Publication of Gabriel Rosenstock’s The Art of Disappearing

Haiku - the Art of Disappearing

Part Seven & End

By Gabriel Rosenstock

Inner sanctum … The haikuist can disappear into the flesh, taste, shape, odour and colour of an apple where most mainstream poets are left behind, maintaining a visibility, a longing, outside of the event.

George Meredith saw a girl in an orchard. She bites into an apple and turns to look at him:

Her twinkle between frank and shy

My thirst to bite where she had bit …

This is beautiful, of course, but it is only on the verge of disappearance. It is still one foot, at least, in the world of duality and desire. Pseudo-haiku – the bulk of haiku today – is similarly self-reflexive.

The ninth century poetess Ono no Komachi is also on the verge of the flow, that delicate moment in which disappearance might or might not happen:

This body

grown fragile, floating,

a reed cut from its roots …

if a stream would ask me

to follow, I’d go, I think

(The Ink Dark Moon, Vintage Books, 1990)

Pure haiku dissolves in its own immaculate spirit, in untainted essence.

True haiku probes the nature of reality and our perception of it. In Haiku Enlightenment we referred to what such sages as Papaji and Wei Wu Wei teach: ‘We do not seize Reality. Reality seizes us.’ Haiku does this in bringing the full shock and brilliance of the visible and invisible realms to our senses. It makes sense of everything, penetrating into our inner sanctum and, simultaneously, reverberating throughout the cosmic ocean. In this haiku world, we come to our senses, the angelic side of our being and the animal side are awake, as one.

This quality is rarely found today in mainstream literature. We can see it, however, in much Inuit poetry:

I was out in my kayak

I was out at sea in it

I was paddling

very gently in the fjord Ammassivik

There was ice in the water

and on the water a petrel

turned his head this way that way

Didn’t see me paddling

Suddenly nothing but his tail

Then nothing

He plunged but not for me:

Huge head upon the water

Great hairy seal

Giant head with giant eyes, moustache

All shining and dripping

And the seal came gently towards me

Why didn’t I harpoon him?

Was I sorry for him?

Was it the day, the spring day, the seal

Playing in the sun

Like me?

(http://www.ubu.com/ethno/poems/09.html)

Such vision! Such clarity! Such oneness! There is wonderful humanity in this poem as well. It sings the shining moment now, the senses and the heart all terribly alive. But this vision, this seeing the new in everyday things in all their colour, shape, texture and movement, this is rare in our lives today and rarer still in contemporary poetry. We must look to haiku if we wish such vividness, such freshness, such immediacy to permeate our lives.

***

Disappearing – a trick? Disappearing is not some kind of a trick with which to impress your friends. If it’s tricks you’re after, study Houdini not haiku. No tricks. No ego.

Every culture has some myth or legend, some proverb or anecdote to remind us of the dangers of ego. Sinend – who gives her name to the River Shannon – approached the well of knowledge but the well rose up and drowned her. Self-effacement is necessary to experience the true haiku moment.

white plum blossoms

absorbing the colour

of morning

Buson

(Version: GR)

What is white? What is colour? The great wonder of haiku is that we come to know that nothing is fixed. As soon as we become mysteriously familiar with some moment of becoming, some numinous embodiment, it changes into something else. As we change. That is why we speak here of the gentle art of disappearing. Reality is so momentary that only a haiku can catch it. Softly, softly catchee monkey …

***

You have to be invisible! Master-photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, in a filmed interview, defined the key to his art as this: ‘You have to be invisible!’ Describing photography he says, ‘It’s a dance … Fully living in the instant!’ This is similar to the flow of Tao mentioned in our opening pages. ‘You don’t take the photo. It’s the photo that takes you,’ he says. This, in a way, is what Papaji says, what Wei Wu Wei says. And Cartier-Bresson goes on: ‘Like an orgasm. There’s a moment when its bursts.’ This, in a way, is Osho.

See the connection, the Oneness. Drop dogma. We can revolutionise the quality of our lives with this consciousness. Drop the ‘I’:

stuck to the slab

the i

of the frozen f sh

David Steele

***

The haikuist is not a Quietist … Dropping the ‘I’ or deciding to use it in lower case should not be a stylistic decision that is made when drafting or rewriting a haiku. ‘Oh, I’ll say that differently and drop the I’. No. The ‘I’ should not be there in the first place – not in true haiku, that is to say, haiku in its purest form. And who wants impure haiku, impure anything? By being in the world, disappearing in the haiku moment – the sacred stream of time, as Hackett says - returning only to disappear again in successive haiku moments, the haikuist enjoys the physical and spiritual benefits of Quietism without retreating from the world:

the damsel fly leaving

the lily again and again

only to return

Tom Clausen

Haiku is entering the world, the visible world, the invisible world, the world of light and shade:

A crane walks forth

into the brightness that is called

the start of winter

Kagiwada Yu-ko

***

The flow of coming and going … The haikuist is at the centre of an incessant flow of coming and going, a vortex of sights and sounds and is tuned into the invisible laws which govern all phenomena:

Spring thaw –

names on the gravestones

reappear

Michael Meyerhofer

(World Haiku Review, Dec. 2003)

These moments flow whether we are aware of them or not. Awareness simply gives us a haiku opportunity:

petals

from an unseen cherry tree

drift past my window

Robert Gibson

(ibid.)

In such moments of awareness, the vortex can become hushed, still:

cold rain –

a nun’s step quietened

by leaves

Alison Williams

(Blithe Spirit, Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2001)

Hushed and still. Almost in slumber. And then another rejuvenating awakening!

how wonderful

after a long drought

being a wet hen

Branislava Krzelj

(Version: GR)

The knowing, observant eye informed by a sympathetic heart:

gorta an gheimhridh

theann an préachán críonna

cac na gcaorach

Cathal Ó Searcaigh

(Seal i Neipeal, CIC 2004)

winter hunger

the old crow gobbles sheep droppings

(Trans. GR)

Soberness once more, as the mood dictates, as the silent moment describes itself:

on the river

a lone gull

walks the frozen water

Michael Rehling

(Cherry Blossoms, River Man Publishing, Sweden, 2003)

***

Simply looking … Looking, looking, all the time:

looking at

one crane

among ten thousand

Yamada Chiejo

(Haiku International 1995)

And where else to go but into the vortex of colour and sound again – and a deep vortex it is too:

from deep within

the rooster crows –

eye glinting

Janice M. Bostok

We can imagine the glint in the haikuist’s eye, the eye that sees the invisible taking shape, the inaudible taking sound, the joyous germination of the haiku moment in ‘mysterious unity’, that same unity alluded to by Chuang Tzu in our opening pages.

long winter months

then a robin

brushing against my window

Jocelyne Villeneuve

(Four Seasons)

Unthinkable …How unthinkable it would be if we had no robins. Then again, does anyone really know what species of animals, birds and insects are definitely going to survive? As we lose the harbingers of seasons, we also lose something of our relation to the eternal coming and going of phenomena.

***

One of the seemingly unstoppable trends in many parts of the world during the twentieth century was the decay of the folkloric mind and a consequent detachment from landscape. How can we relate, as haikuists, to a landscape we inhabit and claim to cherish without repossessing – as much as possible – the nomenclature and lore of flora and fauna? Colonisation can wipe this inheritance away, or distort it, as has happened frequently to place-names:

‘I treasure these fond little names when they come into my keeping. From the shores of An Cheathrú Rua, I remember a creek a few feet wide called An Ing Mhór, the big notch, and close by it, An Ing Chaol, the narrow notch, with between them a pinch or two of sand called, believe it or not, An Tráighín Idir Dhá Ing, the little beach between two notches. Would I even have noticed these places strolling by, if they had not been named to me?’

Tim Robinson in The Seanchaí and the Database, Epiphanies of the Earth (Irish Pages, Volume 2, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2003).

The haikuist celebrates the living world. Part of that living world is the accumulated lore which defines its micro-typography. Let us all delve deep into this lore and help to renew its innate vitality.

***

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